#two more sagas to go lets goooo

[joshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh]

22/7 episode 6 was yet another pretty eh one. It’s the Reika episode, and once again the respective episode girl’s baggage is about her family. For you see, Reika’s mum died during childbirth, so Reika’s dad’s been struggling at work to make amends meet for the pair of them. And Reika was hesitant to be an idol since she wanted to be there for her dad. Now how does this meaningfully tie into the episode’s central conflict? It uh, doesn’t really. It’s sort of just intermittent flashbacks to said backstory and then her in the now not wanting to do a beach photoshoot since her swimsuit’s too skimpy. But if she doesn’t, the entire shoot is wasted, and also since our god The Wall declared her the leader, she like super needs to do it because oh she’s always the one being a lecturing tsundere but now she’s needing to be lectured so she’s a bad leader and a hypocrite unless she puts on the swimsuit. It’s an odd yet still generic little arc, but I guess it’s sufficient enough. It also means the structure of the episode is kinda fun since it’s balancing a beach episode, with Reika’s flashbacks, and with the other girls showing up to talk to Reika about the shoot, and we get to see their personalities at play in how they try to convince her, so Miu and Sakura are super sweet obviously, Nicole’s all “you’re an idol, right?” and in her first display of actual character, Akane presents like, an objective argument, some subjective shit, and a sentimental argument, and then pulls a dice out of her tit to leave it up to chance. Fun I guess. I would still say I’m not enamoured by Reika’s character at all, but in this sea of middle-of-the-road character focused episodes this one is like, fine. That’s all.

Also since I don’t know where else to say this, Reika apparently had a boyfriend for a bit in highschool, which is interesting, because idol shows don’t usually do that uh, ever. It means nothing for her character or anything, it’s a very passing comment, but I wonder how like, specifically the Japanese fans reacted to that, since a notable amount of Japanese idol fans can be uh, yeah. Idk just wanted to bring that up. Personally I don’t really care it’s just one of the smaller ways in which 22/7′s breaking conventions.

And it wouldn’t be me talking about 22/7 without 10 billion screenshots so let’s goooo

We are obviously a beach episodes so here’s our money shots - I didn’t really process that Miyako was flat before this episode but hey that’s cool with me.

What a beautiful saga.

When does this show’s yuri sex scene even happen

Here’s more miscellaneous beach shit.

I didn’t really take any Reika captures but I think she’s cute with short hair so hey I got these two in.

Anyway here’s the usual Miu storm.

Honestly feel like cropping that Miu and making her my pfp because I really do love her.

Now these next two captures are like actually important so pay attention.

Oh fuck Miu’s sick!!! Yeah she just fuckin passes out. So here I thought we were taking a break from regularly scheduled not-main-character episodes to remind us who the main character actually is, but no, after Miu falls down, ill, so too does everyone except from Jun. Okay? That’s one way to give us a Jun episode I suppose. So are we about to learn that our god The Wall can actually be a force for evil too? I mean that thing last episode about it shitting out commands turned out to just be some individual jobs, radio personalities, TV ads, stuff like that for each idol, so nothing sinister there. But I feel like where that could have been interpreted as the Wall malfunctioning last episode, here it just seems like, something’s happened to actually harm the girls, so like, I mean where will that go, who knows.

Also one last thing I want to mention is that there was some bgm playing that was actually pretty good, from like 16 minutes in to 18 minutes in or something I wasn’t keeping track. But it sounded nice and I was actually impressed.

Because it turns out it was just a Shampoo instrumental cover. Oh well.

That’s it.

[anghraine]

irresistible-revolution replied to your post: My positive feelings about the movie aside, IMO...

I think it’s the racial optics that get people fucked up about this tbh. Most of us are hardwired to conflate slavery with black bodies and power/ freedom with white ones. Lol I periodically forget about Anakin’s slavery background too, just cuz the whiteness of the skywalker fam and their centrality to the saga makes it difficult to associate slavery with them. I’ll be interested to see how this new trilogy resolves the issue of a skywalker legacy since I did feel heavy references to this idea of aristocratic decay as embodied by Snoke and the withered old Jedi tree.

I can definitely see that with slavery, especially since it was so casually presented and underdeveloped in the first place. I get the vague impression that it’s more Roman than American, but mostly it’s just ... there, with little weight.

But I’d think the sheer helllishness of Tatooine and its tight association with the Skywalkers would factor into this weird feudal Skywalkers narrative. SW does go pretty far out of its way to emphasize that they came from nothing. In a way, Kylo telling Rey that she came from nothing, and then the random child slave on Exploitation McCapitalism planet using the Force at the end, brings it back around to Luke’s and Anakin’s narratives more than it diverges from them.

I agree the ST is definitely interested in decay--but in a much broader sense, I think, than directly hierarchical. Like, Snoke isn’t preoccupied with carrying on the glory and power of the Sith as a rightful successor the way that Palpatine, Maul, and so on are, or even seem to consider himself a successor to them at all. He’s a power-hungry Vader fanboy whose Dark Side romanticization of the past blinds him to the present. Even when he himself recognizes that the rising ‘light’ he sensed was Random Girl From Nowhere and not Vader’s son, he still can only see Rey as a path to Luke. And Kylo is just his Vader fix-fic to Snoke, so he completely fails to see that Kylo’s the real threat.

IMO, TLJ is more focused on preoccupation with the past in general, whether in mythologizing it (Rey, Luke), recreating it (as the characters were constantly trying to do in TFA; Snoke, Rey), or wrecking it (these days, Kylo and Luke). That’s part of the reason that TLJ so relentlessly sets up familiar story beats and then grinds them underfoot, and even more, why so much about Rey’s arc in particular is about the importance of truly understanding the past and its bearing on the present, without nostalgia/mythologizing/lies/etc. I think we especially see that in a) the mirrors, where what she comes from turns out to be simply herself, in a scene which itself turns out to be a past incident the present Rey is wrangling with, and b) Luke’s and Kylo’s different visions of what happened before the destruction of the Temple, and the importance of finding and accepting the truth of what happened, and living in the present--that’s the power of Luke’s apology without forgiveness, I think.

We’ll have to see and I’ll watch it again, but my kneejerk impression is that Kylo’s ~let it goooo~ is meant to be ... kind of on the right ideological path, but taken way too far(DESTROY EVERYTHING!!!) and not far enough(it’s actually fuelled by his inability to let things go). His obsession with the past culminates in his confrontation with someone who isn’t actually there(the camera focuses on Luke’s projection not leaving footprints, but Kylo never notices), and that’s what allows the Resistance (now balanced between the restive young fighters and uncommunicative aging heroes) to escape, along with Rey’s realization that she can be the hero of today’s story, with help from relics of the past (Chewie figuratively, the Falcon literally).

Tl;dr I feel like the Skywalker legacy is one part of that preoccupation with legacy in general, the main vehicle for it, but there’s both a lot more and a lot less going on than the RIAN JOHNSON HERO OF THE PROLETARIAT takes allow. And I think it’s much more of a criticism of modern culture and media than of two whole Skywalker protagonists over forty years of film, you know?